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goldenpaperscissors · 2 years

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About Annabeth

The recent casting announcement for the new Percy Jackson series felt like a slap to the face. After seeing the actors chosen, I was immediately filled with disappointment and anger for Disney, and even Rick Riordan himself. They had gotten my hopes up with promises to finally bring a faithful adaptation of the books to the screen, and then they immediately broke that promise. Frankly, I felt betrayed and heartbroken.

Obviously I have nothing against the actors themselves. They are just doing their best and I actually believe that they’ll do great in the show. They all seem to be talented actors, and any hate they get over something out of their control is not fair to them, and it definitely isn’t fair to them to ask for a recasting. In fact lots of fans of the series are quite happy with this casting decision. I can’t deny that the new trio look good together. As an artist myself, I’ve been especially interested in all the new fanart this announcement has generated. Yet, what I’ve found has been… interesting to say the least.

Even among those who are excited about the new cast, everyone seems to have a different opinion on how they want the characters to look in the actual show. While some artists haven’t changed anything about the actors appearances, others still depict Percy with black hair, and Annabeth with bleached hair, despite Rick’s claims that he doesn’t intend to do any such thing.

Among those fans who, like me, were disappointed in the casting, I’ve found comments begging for Annabeth to at least have her signature gray eyes, like they’re grasping for any thread of hope that this Annabeth could look anything like the one they grew up with. Others still have been forced to accept that they will probably never get to see a faithful depiction of the character on screen.

After Walker Scobell was announced as the choice for Percy, I was excited. I watched the Adam Project even before I knew that he was going to be Percy, so I knew that he was a good choice, and a good actor. I wasn’t concerned about the color of his hair because I thought it was a given that it would be darkened or something like that for the actual show. Dyes and wigs are common practice for movies and shows that want their actors to portray certain characters. Yet when Rick Riordan was asked if they would by dying Walker’s hair, he said this:

“We have had zero conversations about this. Personally, I think this is a non-issue. For me, finding the right actors has never been about hair color, eye color, skin color, or any other single physical trait, even if they were described a certain way in the books. As many of you know, I flubbed such details myself several times in the series. Thalia’s eyes changed from green to blue. Oops! Annabeth’s hair was curly and then it was straight. Nico was described as olive-skinned, then later as pale. Blackjack even changed from a mare to a stallion over the course of two books. Whelp, not sure what happened there, but too late now! If I may invoke the Movies That Shall Not Be Watched, I know a lot of you cared deeply and were unhappy when Annabeth turned out to be a brunette rather than blonde, but for me, that was never the main issue. What mattered were that those actors, as talented and wonderful as they are, were WAY too old for the parts as I wrote them, and their age was central to the plot. What I want to see are age-appropriate actors who can embody the personalities of the characters, nail their voices and their sense of humor, and make you believe: “Yes, that is Percy. That is Grover. That is Annabeth,” even if they’re not exactly how the characters were described physically in the books. Again, that’s just my personal opinion and my approach. So blond Percy? Hey, why not? IMO Walker is awesome just as he is. He is perfect for the role.” There are several issues with this. While I agree that appearance should absolutely not be the #1 consideration when looking for the right actor to cast for a project like this, it shouldn’t be completely ignored. This show isn’t a middle school play, it’s going to become one of the definitive versions of the Percy Jackson franchise. I’ll get back to that later.

@takaraphoenix on tumblr said about this quote from Rick:

“What I’m reading here isn’t “racebending the characters doesn’t matter because the important thing is the essence and energy the actors bring”, what I’m reading here is “racebending doesn’t matter because I’m a shitty writer lol.” Because that’s what he’s saying. He’s saying that the actors’ physical appearance doesn’t matter because he never cared enough to remember what his own characters look like to begin with.

“Sure, in its very essence, what eye-color Thalia has doesn’t matter all that much, but it’s about what this represents. This represents that he doesn’t even care enough to know his characters, when every die-hard Percy Jackson fan has greedily soaked up and memorized every tiny little detail of description that he has given us because we actually love these characters.”

Now, this is a pretty harsh evaluation, and I don’t really believe that Rick doesn’t care about his characters or the way they look, (or at least, he didn’t) and I’ll get to that in a bit, but Takaraphoenix is right when they say it comes off that way.

Adding on to this, the examples of inconsistencies and mistakes that Rick gave are minimal compared to what he’s trying to justify with his casting decisions. Eye color is hardly noticeable in real life unless you get up in someone’s face. If you showed me two people who looked the same except one had blue eyes and one had green eyes, I’d still say they could pass off as the same character. I can look at Daniel Radcliffe in the Harry Potter movies and still say he looks like Harry from the books, even though his eyes are a different color. And they even tried to give him green eyes, and then gave a valid reason why it wasn’t feasible. And people were okay with that!

As for Annabeth’s hair changing from curly to straight, that’s a pretty superficial change. For example, I have naturally straight hair, but when I curl it, I still look like the same person I was before. The difference between changing the way hair strands fall and changing a character’s entire color palette is vast. Not even comparable.

Rick mentioned that what really mattered to him about the characters were their personalities, voices, and sense of humor. I agree with this. Characters can still be distinct in all these aspects without having a distinct appearance. Describing the way a character looks isn’t essential to writing a good story about that character. For example, possibly my favorite book series of all time, The Jack Blank Adventures by Matt Myklusch, features several main characters who never really get full physical descriptions, yes they still have fully fleshed out personalities and voices. It was done so well that I never even realized there was no physical description of Trea until I saw some artists drawing her in ways completely different to how I had always imagined her. And I wasn’t upset about it. After all, my version of Trea was purely my own interpretation, and theirs was their interpretation. Her appearance genuinely was not important to her character, so it just… wasn’t there. All you really get about the physical appearance of most of the characters in Jack Blank Adventures are offhand comments every once in a while, vague descriptors that could mean anything and are important to the character like “she was beautiful,” or worldbuilding tidbits, like the aliens that have silver skin. Rarely is there ever a paragraph entirely devoted to describing a character’s appearance. This isn’t unique to this series either. There are tons of works in literature that get away with describing very little about the way their characters look, and they still manage to be compelling.

This brings me back to the point about Rick claiming that he never really cared about the way his characters looked, and only cared about their personalities. Really, Rick? Then please explain to me why one of the very first paragraphs about Annabeth explicitly states her physical appearance, including skin tone, hair color, and even eye color, and why this same description stays majorly consistent and is brought up again and again throughout the series. If it really didn’t matter, those descriptions could easily have been left out entirely.

And to all those who think the reason most of the hate is directed towards Annabeth and not the other two main leads just because she’s black, at least in my case, it’s not because of her race, it’s because Annabeth had the most concrete and repeated physical description out of any of the other characters in the series. Youtube artist Lavendertowne said in a video where she was attempting to draw the Percy Jackson characters as true to the books as possible:

“I had about twice as many notes about Annabeth as I did about either of the male main characters. She just gets described a lot, and so it makes it even more starkly different between the actress that they picked and the way that they styled her versus the character that she’s supposed to be.” (7:09 - FIXING THE WORST MOVIE ADAPTATION EVER: PERCY JACKSON // By the Book: Episode 4)

This video came out three years ago, and so the actress mentioned is of course Alexandra Daddario from the awful movies, but unfortunately this still applies to Leah. Rick was even aware that the fans were upset by dark-haired Annabeth in the movie and decided to brush it off without really considering why the complaints about her were mainly physical, while the complaints about Grover were more from a writing standpoint. And the reason is because Annabeth’s physical appearance is really hammered in in the books while Percy and Grover were always a little more detached from their appearances, especially early on, partly because the books were from Percy’s perspective. In Heroes of Olympus, Percy’s appearance is much more solidified and mentioned more often once we get to see how the other characters see him.

Grover is one of those characters who never really got much of a physical description in the books other than of course the worldbuilding aspect of him being a satyr. As far as I can tell, all the official artwork of Grover depicts him as caucasian, but that was genuinely never as important as his personality, which the awful movies completely butchered. I actually have really high hopes for Aryan in this role, and I’m excited to see how he portrays Grover’s sweet, nervous personality.

The last point I want to touch on is the one I’m sure a lot of people would rather avoid. You see, regardless of Disney’s or Rick’s actual intentions when choosing who to cast, they must have been aware of what making a decision like this would suggest, given the current political climate. At first, I was willing to give Rick the benefit of the doubt on this. He seems very happy with the casting decisions and Percy Jackson and the Olympians is a series that I would say is basically free of any kind of identity politics. I didn’t like his decisions, but I was willing to accept, and hoped, that he really did believe that these kids were the best choices to portray his character’s personalities, like he said, even if his arguments and justifications were rather… weak. Especially considering how many auditions they must have received from other girls who probably would have also done a good job as Annabeth, and who actually looked the part.

Then I remembered that the reason I stopped reading The Trials of Apollo was because it had started shoving more of the identity politics side of things in my face. And since then I’ve been really worried that this author would sacrifice the integrity of his characters that are loved by readers around the world just to enforce some kind of political agenda.

I think at this point what I’m actually mad about is that I feel lied to. Rick promised us a faithful adaptation of the books, not a new twist on characters we love. If the new series had been advertised as a more of a reboot, or a Brand New, Never Before Seen take on Percy Jackson and the Olympians where Rick was able to make changes he wished he’d made in hindsight, at least I would know what to expect. And as a writer myself, I can respect wishing you made different decisions in previous writing with new perspectives.

After all, a big part of the reason why nobody liked the awful movies is because even as standalone films, they were just… bad movies. My hope now is that the Disney+ show will still be able to be a good show, even if it clearly isn’t going to be the completely faithful adaptation that it promised it would be. If the writers aren’t bound by the books when it comes to casting, who knows what kind of decisions they’ll be able to make with the plot and characters. I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping that any changes made to the script will be improvements on the original story, and not woke bullcrap.

To sum up, I kind of swung from hating the decision to make Annabeth black but giving Rick the benefit of the doubt and wanting to trust him, to actually seeing lots of potential for Annabeth’s character growth with this new perspective, but also realizing that those who cast her in the first place probably had ulterior political motives. At this point, I’m curious to see if Leah will be able to overcome that and come into her own as Annabeth 2.0, and not just- Annabeth, but she’s black and totallywasthewholetimedefinitelythisishowshewassupposedtobeallalong. Because she wasn’t. And if Rick believes that, he’s delusional. If you somehow read through this whole thing I just want to say thanks, whether you agree with me or not I appreciate being able to see everyone’s perspectives on this. It was kind of a big ramble that I just drafted up this morning.

#annabeth chase #PJO #HOO #percy jackson #percy jackon and the olympians #grover underwood #riordan universe #riordan books #rick riordan #leah sava jeffries #walker scobell #aryan simhadri #disney #jack blank adventures #jack blank #trea #lavendertowne #harry potter #daniel radcliffe

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